The study tracked 70 million posts on Weibo, China's version of Twitter. Angry tweets were more likely to influence others -- through simple retweeting or by inspiring new angry messages – up to three degrees away from the original user.

This is hardly surprising. While the study found that online rage in China is primarily directed at international conflicts and domestic social problems, stateside, it seems, Twitter is often by customers as a tool to publicly rant about bad customer service.

Study or no study, most media-savvy businesses already know that angry messages on social media are powerful; unless immediately dealt with and contained, they can easily lead to a wildfire of bad publicity.

On the other side of the spectrum: Back in summer 2012, the mobile company O2 experienced widespread network problems. Thousands of customers took to Twitter to vent. Instead of ignoring the problem, O2 immediately joined the conversation, engaging with customers through apologetic, honest, and often funny tweets.